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Friday, October 26, 2012

Cloud Atlas

Review by Matt Finley

Unfilmable. It was an adjective often
invoked in fan discussions of David Mitchell’s Booker
Prize-nominated 2004 novel Cloud Atlas – a delightful, time-
and genre-spanning puzzle box that uses a deceptively simple
structure to tell six interlocking stories spanning four centuries.
Now it’s 2012, and Wachowski brothers Lana and Andy (THE MATRIX)
along with Tom Tykwer (RUN LOLA RUN) just filmed that puppy.
The result, also titled CLOUD ATLAS, is a strange, richly
imagined mosaic comprised of equal parts filmmaking expertise,
well-intentioned soapbox philosophizing, and consummate
self-absorption.

I wholeheartedly recommend this film to
anyone who enjoys movies, but there’s a good chance that you’ll
absolutely hate it. I know. A ringing endorsement.

If you don’t know anything about the
film, it’s made up of six stories, all starring some permutation of
the same cast – Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, Hugo
Weaving, Jim Sturgess and Doona Bae – whose characters are reborn
and reconfigured across the centuries, playing out variations of
their triumphs and sins in a range of scenarios that vary in
cinematic scope from a slapstick adventure though a modern nursing
home to a clone-centered labor rebellion in a future of totalitarian
capitalism.

Whereas Mitchell’s novel is something
of a riddle, presenting six disparate stories and allowing the reader
to coax out the underlying connective tissue, thematic sinews and
character meat, Tykwer and the Wachowskis two (who co-wrote the
screenplay and split directing duties) have chosen to brightly
highlight (and bold and italicize and then shoot fireworks at) the
larger ideas – truth and greed and love and betrayal and all that
good stuff.

The complexity of the film, then,
doesn’t come from any larger, groping reflections on the meaning of
a particular visual metaphor or the larger artistic intentions of the
work, but instead from the simple fact that each story is split into
dozens of two to five minute scenes between which the audience must
flitter and jump for nearly three hours.

Still, if you can forgive some
intermittent visual bombast, and the perpetual heavy-handed
voiceovers that twine platitudes and naval-gazing emotional
masturbation into the sickly-sweet rope that bind the stories, CLOUD
ATLAS boasts a wealth of rewarding material.

For as lengthy and thematically
overblown as it is, this is an impressively controlled and
surprisingly coherent film. Like the novel, the film deals in a
variety of genres. And, at its best, it exploits the dialects of each
of these – from period romance to sci-fi to comedy – to stress
that, for as much as the piece toils over all the sublime aching
defeats and passions of the human experience, it’s equally
interested in the human obsession with structuring our shared
experiences into consumable narratives that, while wildly different
in their plots and setting, are all forged in the crucible of the
human heart, and, as such, find even the most unrelatable characters
banging their heads against the same messy, life-y stuff.

Bearing that in mind, I almost wish
some of the stories descended a bit farther into self-conscious genre
wetwork – the 1970s bit, for example, does a great job with
its period props and costumes, but casts too wide of a stylistic net,
referencing the era rather than inhabiting it. Sure, you get CHINA
SYNDROME-style nuclear paranoia plus a paper chase and a
not-nearly-ballsy-enough niblet of Blaxploitation, but with the
swelling symphonic soundtrack and all-too-generic chase sequences, it
never really crystallizes into the full-on bit of throwback
b-moviedom that it might have been.

Still, After the dual disasters of
RELOADED and REVOLUTIONS, not to mention their
scattershot V FOR VENDETTA screenplay (confession: I totally
dug SPEED RACER), it was a treat to see the Wachowskis
exhibiting such (relative) restraint. To be sure the film never lets
you forget that it has epic pretensions, but you can’t blame a
couple C-4 enthusiasts for finding dynamite subtle. Tykwer,
meanwhile, whose last book-to-film adaptation PERFUME: THE STORY
OF A MURDERER tried to beat an epic out of an enjoyable bit of
pulp fiction, has finally found source material to fit his cinematic
aspirations.

I can already hear the fanboy
choir: CLOUD ATLAS is the type of film that you have to see twice
to catch everything.

Everything? Maybe. But Green-gilled as
some will curdle at the movie’s repeated syrupy narration and
nail-on-the-head editing, the forthrightness with which it sews its
heart to its sleeve, and the uncharacteristic attention to
detail that dresses each of its six story worlds, work well in tandem
to make an enjoyable and off-center single-serving film, while still
offering plenty of tantalizing details to be discovered and puzzled
over by those who feel engaged enough to become repeat viewers.

(Will some feel it suffers from that
Christopher Nolan disorder, its emotional moments so precisely
engineered as to feel cold and mechanical? Mm’yeah. But I was on
board.)

It’s difficult: the elements that
give the movie's six interlaced realities enough order (the
recurring actors, bridging narration, scenes shot and edited for the
concerted purpose of thematic juxtaposition) to keep it fun and
downright popcorn-worthy are the same things that repel the part of
me that wants to enjoy it as a deeper, more honest bit of serious
art. And that makes me wonder where the film’s pretensions end and
mine begin. also: #betterthanwatchmen (3 out of 4 stars)